Considering how rapidly the right’s “war on woke” is expanding, it was perhaps inevitable: Self-identified “mama bears” on a Texas school board are angry that a classroom had a poster showing people of different races holding hands. Last week, the school board in Conroe, Texas, a small city north of Houston, turned the right-wing mania for censorship into a dark parody of itself. At issue? A poster that seemed to imply that interracial friendship is possible.
According to ABC 13 Eyewitness News in Houston, things started when school trustee Melissa Dungan declared that she had spoken to parents who were upset about “displays of personal ideologies in classrooms.” When pressed for an example, according to the news report, “Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.”
“I wish I was shocked,” Dungan said of the poster. “I am aware these trends have been happening for many years.”
Yes, that is a fair point and one I’d missed a bit from your original post. I appreciated the scare quotes in the article but you’re not wrong.
That said, I don’t know if you’re exactly right either. “Woke” was co-opted by the fash. I don’t think we should just let them have it. A good starting point is for every interlocutor to stop them and ask them to define the word every time they use it. The word is not the problem.
They call themselves anti-woke; by calling them anti-woke you are letting them have it. Practically giving it to them, in fact.
You’re only letting them have it if you also let them define it. They are anti-woke. Woke (aware of structural injustice) is not a bad thing to be. 90% of the population has every reason to be woke because 90% of the population is subject to structural injustice. But far too many have been distracted by the idea that some other fucked-over group has it better than them, or gains consolation from not being quite at the bottom of the pile.
It’s a neat trick but so easy to expose. And one of the simplest ways to expose it is to make them spell out what they think it means.
You pulled that percentage out of your ass. 😏
White-passing Americans (white or white-mixed) make up 71% of the country. 35% are white men. Based on the most common numbers I’m seeing, 30% are straight and cis. 80% of America is Christian (fug it’s that high???), so that gives us roughly 22% straight white cis christian males.
That huge mass of people is predisposed to being anti-woke because they stand to lose the most from anti-racism and anti-sexism and queer acceptance and religious tolerance etc. Structural injustice isn’t just a historical accident, it was a deliberate creation by the ruling class through the usage of genocide and slavery and apartheid to ensure that a huge minority of the population would be too comfortable and to loyal to their rulers to ever revolt and would stand up for their privileges against the mobs of the havenots.
Call them anti-woke if you want. They’re also settlers, reactionaries, and Amerikkkan Nazis
90% of the population are either too poor not to be suffering structural injustice, or are relatively well off but still too Black, too queer, too female,. Class and race cannot be separated. If we ignore the people who are struggling just because they’re blaming the wrong people for their struggles, fascism will win.
Do you think a working class Israeli faces the same injustices as a working class Palestinian? A working class Jew in 1935 Germany the same as a working class Christian?
You’re the one trying to separate class and race. Don’t think of America like a country, think of it like an occupation or a regime.
We gotta destroy whiteness. You can’t win by just making whitey woke.
No, of course I don’t. But a working class Israeli has a hell of a lot more in common with a working class Palestinian than they do with the Israeli ruling class. And they may not get much publicity (and a lot of jail time) but quite a lot of Israelis recognise that; I know because I have worked with some of them.
Oppression Olympics is a dismal fucking sport. Divide and fucking rule from the bottom up. Completely self-defeating. It is structural and if you refuse to expose the structures, you’ll never change a thing.
This isn’t oppression olympics, it’s anti-imperialist struggle! Divide and conquer already happened when the ruling class elevated a portion of the working class to use as a bludgeon to oppress the rest of the working class. It’s too late to coddle the white mob and beg them to join us in the struggle for liberation - we have to take away their whiteness, render them as workers just like the rest of us.
The woke philosophers have only interpreted structural oppression in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
The concept of whiteness needs to go. But white people are no more a homogeneous blob of identity than Black people, or LGBT people, or Jewish people (some of whom are white). I’ll oppose those who turn to racism and bigotry as a solution to their problems. As I do Louis Farrakhan for his anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny and general cunty conservatism. Being oppressed is not an excuse to do some oppressing of your own. But it’s really fucking easy to see how people fall into that trap. And really fucking racist to believe that Black people can’t be authoritarian fuckwits, or that Jewish people can’t oppose Israel, or that white people can’t be oppressed by poverty.
Steven Avery and Brendan Darcy were fucked over because they are poor, not protected because they are white. Black people are fucked over with impunity because the colour of their skin is a marker of powerlessness. Women and LGBT people are fucked over because that which is feminine is despised.
This is a really useful example of what I am talking about. The woman was mistreated because she was Black. She got (a form of) justice because her family is rich.
As soon as she opened her mouth … “I think we made a mistake.”